“What is it?”
It was the Tower. Lightning strikes. The masonry of the tower is blasted away. Flames shoot out of the brickwork. Debris is thrown into space. The occupants hurtle towards earth, their legs scissoring and their arms outflung. The ground rushes up at them.
“Eat your pizza,” Colette said, “before it goes all flabby.”
“I don’t want it.” The Tower, she thought; it’s my least favourite. The death card I can handle. I don’t like the Tower. The Tower means—
Colette saw with alarm that Al’s eyes had slipped out of focus; as if Al were a baby whom she were desperate to placate, whose mouth she was desperate to fill, she grabbed the plastic fork and plunged it into the pizza. “Look, Al. Try a bit of this.”
The fork buckled against the crust; Al snapped back, smiled, took the fork from her hand. “It may not be so bad,” she said. Her voice was small and tight. “Here, Col, let me. When you get the Tower it means your world blows up. Generally. But it can have a—you know, quite a small meaning. Oh, blast this thing.”
“Pick it up in your fingers,” Colette advised.
“Wrap my cards up, then.”
Colette shrank; she was afraid to touch them.
“It’s all right. They won’t bite. They know you. They know you’re my partner.”
Hastily, Colette bundled them into their red wrappings.
“That’s right. Just drop them in my bag.”
“What came over you?”
“I don’t know. I just had to see. It gets you that way sometimes.” Al bit into a piece of raw-looking green pepper, and chewed it for a while. “Colette, there’s something you ought to know. About last night.”
“Your baby voice,” Colette said. “Talking to nobody. That made me laugh. But then I thought at one point you were having a heart attack.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my heart.”
Colette looked meaningfully at her pizza slice.
“Well, yes,” Alison said. “But that’s not going to finish me off. Nobody perishes of a pizza slice. Think of all those millions of Italians, running round quite healthy.”
“It was a horrible weekend.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know,” Colette said. “I didn’t have any expectations. That card—what do you mean by a small meaning?”
“It can be a warning that the structure you’re in won’t contain you anymore. Whether it’s your job or your love life or whatever it is, you’ve out-grown it. It’s not safe to stay put. The Tower is a house you know. So it can mean just that. Move on.”
“What, leave Wexham?”
“Why not? It’s a nice little flat but I’ve got no roots there.”
“Where would you like to move?”
“Somewhere clean. Somewhere new. A house that nobody’s lived in before. Could we do that?”
“New-build is a good investment.” Colette put down her coffee cup. “I’ll look into it.”
“I thought—well, listen, Colette, I’m sure you’re as tired of Morris as I am. I don’t know if he’d ever agree to—you know—take his pension—I think Mandy was being a bit optimistic there. But our lives would be easier, wouldn’t they, if his friends didn’t come round?”
“His friends?” Colette said blankly.
Oh, Jesus, Al said to herself, it’s all uphill work. “He’s beginning to meet up with his friends,” she explained. “I don’t know why he feels the need, but it seems he does. There’s one called Don Aitkenside. I remember him. He had a mermaid on his thigh. And this Dean, now, he’s new to me, but I don’t like the sound of him. He was in the back of the car just now. Spotty kid. Got a police record.”
“Really?” Colette’s flesh crawled. “In the back?”
“With Morris and Don.” Al pushed her plate away. “And now Morris is off looking for this gypsy.”
“Gypsy? But there won’t be room!”
Alison just looked at her sadly. “They don’t take up room, in the usual way,” she said.
“No. Of course not. It’s the way you talk about them.”
“I can’t think how else to talk. I only have the usual words.”
“Of course you do, but it makes me think—I mean it makes me think they’re ordinary blokes, except I can’t see them.”
“I hope they’re not. Not ordinary. I mean, I hope the standard is better than that.”
“You never knew Gavin.”
“Did he smell?”
Colette hesitated. She wanted to be fair. “Not more than he could help.”
“He’d take a bath, would he?”
“Oh yes, a shower.”
“And he wouldn’t, sort of, undo his clothes and take out private bits of himself in public?”
“No!”
“And if he saw a little girl on the street, he wouldn’t turn around and make comments about her? Like, look at it waggle its little arse?”
“You frighten me, Al,” Colette said coldly.
I know, Al thought. Why mention it now?
“You have a very peculiar imagination. How can you think I would marry a man like that?”
“You might not know. Till you’d tied the knot. You might have had a nasty surprise.”
“I wouldn’t have been married to that kind of a man. Not for an instant.”
“But he had magazines, did he?”
“I never looked at them.”
“It’s on the Internet, these days.”
Colette thought, I should have searched his systems. But those were early days, as far as technology went. People weren’t sophisticated, like they are now.
“He used to call hotlines,” she admitted. “Once I myself, just out of curiosity—”
“Did you? What happened?”
“They kept you hanging on for ages. Just messing you about, basically, while you were running up a bill. I put the phone down. I thought, what will it be? Just some woman pretending to come. Moaning, I suppose.”
“You could do that for yourself,” Al said.
“Precisely.”
“If we moved, we might be able to lose them. I suppose Morris will stick, but I’d like to shake off his friends.”
“Wouldn’t they come after us?”
“We’d go somewhere they don’t know.”
“Don’t they have maps?”
“I don’t think they do. I think it’s more like … they’re more like dogs. They have to pick up the scent.”
In the LADIES, she watched her own face in the mirror, as she washed her hands. Colette must be coaxed towards a house move, she must be made to see the sense. Yet she must not be terrified too much. Last night the tape had frightened her, but how could that have been prevented? It was a shock to me too, she said to herself. If Morris has caught up with Aitkenside, can Capstick be far behind? Will he be bringing home MacArthur, and lodging him in the bread bin or her dressing table drawer? Will she sit down to breakfast one day and find Pikey Pete lurking under the lid of the butter dish? Will she get a sudden fright, as Bob Fox taps at the window?
Move on, she thought: it might baffle them for a bit. Even a temporary bewilderment could keep them off your back. It might cause them to disperse, lose each other again in those vast tracts the dead inhabit.
“Oi, oi, oi oi!” Morris called, yelling right in her ear. “Bob’s your uncle!”
“Is he?” she’d said, surprised. “Bob Fox? I always wanted a relative.”
“Blimey, Emmie,” Morris said, “is she simple, or what?”
That night, when they got home, Morris crept in with them; the others, his friends, seemed to have melted away, somewhere in Bedfordshire between Junctions 9 and 10. To check for them, she lifted the carpet in the boot of the car, peered into the cold metal well; no one was there, and when she dragged out her case she found it was no heavier than it had been when she packed it. So far so good. To keep them out permanently—that would be another matter. Once inside she was solicitous to Colette, recommending a hot bath and the Coronation Street omnibus edition.